


put your emptiness to melody

by castelia



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Introspection, Luke Patterson Needs a Hug (Julie and The Phantoms), Reggie Peters Needs a Hug (Julie and The Phantoms), Reggie Peters-centric (Julie and The Phantoms), happy new year here's some sadness, this can be read as romantic or friendship whatever floats your boat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:40:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28489980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/castelia/pseuds/castelia
Summary: Reggie convinces everyone around him that everything is fine, no need to worry, because,See, I’m smiling, it’s not that bad.He wonders how long he can keep it up.He finds out it doesn’t matter anymore, because dead kids don’t have to deal with their parents.(Dead kids don’t have parents.)
Relationships: Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters (Julie and The Phantoms)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 121





	put your emptiness to melody

Reggie breathes his last at seventeen.

 _Street dogs haven’t killed us yet_ , he says cheerily moments before street dogs, do, in fact, kill him. He wonders if this makes him a psychic—hey, if ghosts are real—but dismisses the thought.

If leaving the world behind the world and having it move on without you is the type of predictions he makes, he wouldn’t want to make more.

And it did move on without him, the world, without him and Luke and Alex, it kept spinning. It sounds so self-centered, he is _aware_ , but when Reggie looks at the bike shack where his house used to be he can’t help the keen sense of longing he feels in his chest for the past.

A past where people didn’t look through him, where he could brighten up someone’s day with a smile, or at least he tried to.

A past where he could touch and be touched by living people.

A past where the act of sleeping wasn’t going through the motions, but something he actually needed.

They all get moods like this. Where it just hits them—they’re _dead_. Everything they ever wanted, wether it was something as small as acting on a crush or something as big as their aspirations, gone. No time left. That’s it, done, the coda of their song has long passed.

Luke goes to his parents who can’t see him. Alex eases his frustration the way he eases anxiety: with his drums. Reggie goes to the beach where he used to live.

The house is gone, but he doesn’t need it. It was more sharp edged insults than comfort, directed at him more often as the years went by:

_You’re so selfish. You only think about yourself. Weak-minded. Goddamn spoiled, whiny brat._

But the beach. Oh, this beach. This is where he went to soothe his racing mind, the anger, the frustration, and deep beneath it all, the terrible hurt from years of fighting.

He walks through the halls of school and no one sees it and he doesn't want them to. He smiles to brighten up someone else’s day, sometimes, but for the most part, the reason is more selfish.

Reggie convinces everyone around him that everything is fine, no need for teachers to notice anything, and no need to worry his friends who do notice because, _See, I’m smiling, it’s not that bad._

He wonders how long he can keep it up.

He finds out it doesn’t matter anymore, because dead kids don’t have to deal with their parents.

(Dead kids don’t have parents.)

He recalls his mother’s favorite insult with irony: _drop dead_.

Maybe she is the psychic. What did she think, Reggie wonders, when she found out that, like a good son, he followed her request?

He doubts it was anything good. She would rant and rave and get unbelievaby coarse, but he knows she loved him. It’s what his friends don’t get. They only see the bad. They don’t get the little moments in-between of laughter and tears and mutual understanding—they don’t get how stressed she was.

His dad didn’t have such an excuse, but he still likes to believe there was a reason for it all.

It’s nice, believing that.

(Is there a reason why they met their end far too quickly?)

There is not a reason, but there is Julie. He hates to reduce her to a mere consolation prize— _hey, you’re a ghost, but here is a girl who is kind and funny and the friend you didn’t know you were missing_ —but that’s kind of what it is, isn’t it?

After all, he is still dead.

But so are Luke and Alex.

“I’ve been thinking about playing one of our old songs again,” Luke tells him, voice quiet. “Not with Julie or for a crowd, but just because, you know?”

“Thought they reminded you of what Bobby did,” Reggie says, looking out to the ocean. He drowned long before he ever touched a bad street dog. Every fight, every time he felt like an outsider amongst his own friends, every time his cheerful self went away where he couldn’t follow, salty water emerged him until he couldn’t breathe. 

“They do,” Luke says. “I was more thinking about one of our demo songs.”

“Dreaming like we’ll live forever,” he quotes wryly from one of those very songs—the last song they ever played. “Some dream.”

Luke smiles and follows his gaze, staring out at the ocean’s gentle waves. The horizon’s shades are magenta and lavender.

“We’re still here, aren’t we?” he counters.

Reggie looks at him with wide eyes, but he is still looking at the ocean, still smiling.

“Yeah,” Reggie says softly. “Yeah, we are.” He sits down on the sand. “So what’s stopping you from playing right now?”

Luke looks at him, then. Lifts an eyebrow in silent question.

“If only you had magical transportation powers that could get a guitar here…” Reggie says theatrically, before shrugging. “Oh, well.”

Luke huffs out a laugh before doing just that. It’s the acoustic guitar, which surprises him, but fits.

“Take off, last stop…”

Luke looks the same as the last time Reggie heard him perform this song, perhaps a little more worn. He wonders if death washes it away, that spark from when they were alive that lit the fire of creativity and joy. Maybe not. Maybe, in death, the ghosts leave particles of sparks in their wake.

The people on this beach sure seem to appreciate this impromptu concert, even if they can’t see who is behind it. He wonders if this will make a difference in their day, the way Luke always wanted his music to make a difference, to touch people's hearts, people's lives.

He notices Luke’s hands shaking when he plays the chords. “But live it like it’s now or—“ His voice hitches during the last line, and he doesn’t bother finishing it. _Never._ Their dreams happened _never_.

Notes fly through the air, then, of their demo music, intertwined with the music that Bobby stole, intertwined with their new music. The effect is heartbreaking.

“I know why you came here,” Luke says after he comes to an abrubt stop. “I know that sometimes you feel like… Like we all feel, and I’m sorry.”

Reggie misses the moment from before, when Luke was softly smiling under the colorful sky. He is agitated now, his hands still shaking even though he’s stopped playing.

“Why are you sorry?”

The effect of the music is nothing compared to what he says next, choked out and awful. “I killed you.”

Reggie looks at him with disbelief, because— _no_. “No,” he says, giving voice to his horrified thoughts. “You didn’t.”

“You followed me out of the Orpheum and you never came back.”

“You didn’t know,” he protests. All the thoughts he’s ever had about this subject, and there have been many, but this one is so ludicrous it never occured to him. “It’s not your fault. Luke…”

He’s at a loss, here. This thing that’s been dragged to the surface, it’s heavy. It’s _I’ve been dead for more years than I’ve been alive_ kind of heavy, and he barely knows how to carry that.

“Even if that’s true—“

“It is,” he interjects.

“—I just feel so guilty sometimes. And I went to see my parents, but it didn’t help, it just made me feel worse, because—I left them all alone. They’re so sad, Reggie. They’re so sad because I’m dead. We’re dead.”

He sits down, too, after poofing away the guitar. The two of them sit on the sand, listening to the sounds of people talking and seagulls calling.

“We are,” Reggie says, grabbing Luke’s hand and intertwining their fingers until it stops shaking. “We’re still here.”

His eyes gloss over with tears as he looks at Reggie, holding too many emotions to count for this moment in time they aren’t a part of, not really.

He's struck by the fact that he'd do anything for him. He's struck by the fact that while he misses the past, he doesn't hate this new reality as much as he probably should. He's dead, and it sucks, but at least they're still together.

With his free hand, he wipes away the tear tracks on Luke's face. 

"Hey!" he shrieks when Reggie accidentally pokes him in the eye.

"Shut up, I am trying to have a _moment_."

"Here's a moment for you," Luke mutters with promise of vengeance before he tries to pull him into the water.

Reggie smiles, not to lift up anyone's day or to fool anyone, but to cause a lunar eclipse with its brightness.

_(All the times we fell behind were just the keys to paradise.)_


End file.
